Rural e-commerce: ploughing deeply in the field of hope

Farmers are both producers and consumers, but they have been facing the dilemma of "difficult to buy and difficult to sell". Deeply ploughing rural e-commerce and opening up trading joints will help farmers increase their income and stimulate the huge potential for production, consumption and innovation in rural areas.

Recently, rural e-commerce continues to heat up and has become a high-frequency word for many documents at the central and departmental levels. On November 11, when many netizens focused on the promotion of online shopping, the General Office of the State Council purposely published the guidance on accelerating the Development of Rural Electronic Commerce (hereinafter referred to as the guidance). Not long ago, 19 departments, including the Ministry of Commerce, jointly issued another document beneficial to rural e-commerce-opinions on speeding up the development of rural e-commerce.

Speeding up the development of e-commerce in rural areas will help to further activate the huge production, consumption and innovation potential in rural areas, help rural areas and poor areas accelerate the narrowing of the digital divide, and help poor people get rid of poverty at an early date and be well-off at the same time. What is the current situation of rural e-commerce? What is the difficulty? How to achieve the goal of "initially building a rural e-commerce market system in 2020"? A reporter from the Economic Daily interviewed the heads of relevant departments and bureaus of the Ministry of Commerce and experts in the e-commerce industry in this regard.

"the current development of rural e-commerce can be described as fast, wide and hot." Kong Lingyu, deputy director of the Market system Construction Department of the Ministry of Commerce, said. One is fast. Last year, the number of farmers' Internet users rose to 178 million, with 77.14 million online shopping, an increase of 40.6 percent over the same period last year. The scale of online shopping in rural areas exceeded 180 billion yuan, an increase of more than 60 percent over the same period last year. The second is Guang. The coverage is getting wider and wider. The third is heat. E-commerce giants such as Ali, JD.com and SUNING have focused their competition on rural areas. Not only that, traditional rural trade enterprises, such as postal services, supply and marketing, and "thousands of villages and townships" enterprises are also offline to online. By the end of September this year, China Post had launched 100000 service stations. Ali has set up 109 county-level service centers in 21 provinces and rural service points in 4247 villages. JD.com has completed the construction of 700 county-level service centers and developed about 120000 rural promoters.

While seeing the achievements, we should also see that rural e-commerce has encountered many difficult problems that cannot be avoided in the process of development, such as the shortage of talents, high logistics costs, inadequate infrastructure and so on. In this regard, the relevant experts said that they should prescribe the right remedy to the case and solve them in a targeted manner. On the issue of talents, it is necessary to strengthen skills training and promote the plan of one million talents in rural e-commerce; in logistics, it is necessary to strengthen the sharing and connection of transportation, trade circulation, agriculture, supply and marketing, postal and other departments and units, as well as e-commerce and express enterprises related to rural logistics service networks and facilities, speed up the improvement of the county and rural logistics system, and encourage the integration of multiple stations and services on the same network, and so on.

Wang Xiangdong, director of the Research Center of the Informatization Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, suggested that while promoting industrial products to the countryside, we should also expand the space for agricultural products to enter the city. "judging from the situation of on-the-spot investigation, the development of rural e-commerce in many places begins with industrial daily necessities going to the countryside. By contrast, the development of e-commerce of agricultural products in cities and agricultural means of production lags behind." Wang Xiangdong said.

In addition, many experts also suggest that in order to develop rural e-commerce, the government should also strengthen planning and guidance, give full play to the role of existing platforms and third-party platforms, and prevent mass action, blind development, and low-level competition.

It is proposed in the "guiding opinions" that by 2020, a rural e-commerce market system with unified development, orderly competition, good faith and law-abiding, safe and reliable, and green environmental protection will be initially established. How to achieve this goal?

Kong Lingyu believes that, first of all, it is necessary to constantly cultivate and strengthen the main body of the rural e-commerce market. Secondly, we should expand the application of e-commerce in v rural areas. In rural production and life, farmers are not only consumers but also producers. Such identity overlap makes rural e-commerce exist in the whole process of prenatal, mid-production and post-natal. The intervention of rural e-commerce can not only greatly facilitate farmers' production and life, but also promote the rapid growth of farmers' income. Finally, it is necessary to improve the development environment of rural e-commerce and improve public services, market supervision and other aspects.

Wang Xiangdong said that at present, the model of rural e-commerce is booming, with a lot of innovation. But no matter how innovative it is, rural e-commerce still relies on agriculture. "Agriculture is still an important part of the rural economy at present and for a long time to come, and it is also an important industrial support for the development of rural e-commerce in many places. The deep integration of rural e-commerce and agriculture will promote the modernization of agriculture. "